Internet time was a common catchphrase that originated during the late-1990s Internet boom. In this period, people who worked with the Internet had come to believe that "everything moved faster on the 'net", because the Internet made the dissemination of information far easier and cheaper. Fast-moving developments were therefore said to run "on Internet time"; for example:
- Companies released new (usually unstable and buggy) revisions of their software as free downloads, counting on feedback from customers to provide quality assurance. This development strategy, called "release early, release often", was perhaps epitomized in the development of the Netscape Navigator web browser. The resulting pressure to release new features quickly and grab "mindshare" before one's competitors had disastrous effects on software quality, but resulted in an unprecedentedly rapid pace of innovation.
- A meme could travel the world, in the form of forwarded email, in a week or frequently less. Early instances of such memes included the infamous make money fast spam.
- Wormss, viruseses, and other malware could infect large portions of the Internet in a matter of days or hours, crippling systems worldwide with speed that was shocking to system administratorss accustomed to a less networkeded era.
Internet time is also the name for a concept marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative measure of time. Instead of hours and minutes, the 24 hour day is divided up into 1000 parts called "beats" - each beat being 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. Like UTC, time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 beats (written @875) in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo: 0.875 times 24 hours is 21 hours, after 0:00 Swiss time (UTC + 1), is 22:00 UTC.
Its novelty and the decimal system used (metric time) makes it attractive for some people and simpler in use than the traditional Babylonian system of time reckoning using a 24 hour day with each hour composed of sixty minutes, each minute composed of sixty seconds. For example, knowing that there are 1000 beats in a day, if one learned some event took 5500 beats to run to completion, it would be immediately known that it happened over five and a half days. By the same token, if one learnt that some event took place over 5500 hours, it would result in no clear idea of the duration covered for most people until some mental arithmatic, or a quick calculation with paper or calculator was accomplished.
Some of its major drawbacks:
- The use of the Biel Meridian (UTC +1) to denote 0 beats, introduces an unwanted additional Meridian, the Greenwich Meridian (UTC) is the standard Meridian used internationally.
- The second, and not the beat is the basic SI unit of time measurement, the use of an additional time system adds unnecessary complexity.
- Some criticize that the Internet time system is more of commercial marketing attempt, rather than a real system.
- 1000 cannot be divided by 3.
Swatch's "Internet time" appears to be infrequently used, except in connection with Swatch's marketing efforts, or in connection to some niche applications. It is a popular time reference on ICQ for example.
